Editors' Note:Guest blogger Susan Raffo lives in Minneapolis where she writes, is a bodyworker, parents, lives in communal housing, organizes and, when the weather permits, gardens. She is working, collectively, on a book of practical approaches to sharing for busy adults who are tired of holding the whole family/work/social time alone..

My eight-year-old daughter figured out sharing pretty early. Maybe as an only child, she thought sharing would endear her to other children. Maybe she got the sharing gene in her DNA strand. Whatever the reason, she likes to share.

She's the kid at a party who walks around with a bowl of cherries, moving with a smile from person to person, "Would you like some fruit?" she asks, and then continues on to the next person. She gets lots of adult attention for this, "Oh Luca, I love how you share." And "that's so generous, so kind..." That might not be why she started sharing but I'm sure it's part of why she continues.

According to a recent study published in Science, Luca should start outgrowing that sharing thing pretty soon. Sharing is something we do well as young children but then, argues this study, are less interested in as we age.

Norwegian young people, ages 10 to 18, went through an "economics experiment" to determine how they would divvy up a pool of money. The moral of the research is this: sharing is a childish thing. We leave it behind as we grow older.

According to Alexander Cappelen, one of the authors of the study, it's not clear what triggers the change in philosophy, from fairness to meritocracy, but he believes it may be the result of increasing exposure to achievement-based activities, like sports and standardized tests. "Young children are rarely rewarded for individual achievement. There is an extremely egalitarian culture in their school life. But as they get older they are exposed to more meritocratic institutions, and that might change their views on equality," he says. In other words, this is true because we make it true. It's what we teach them.

This depresses me. What an unloving thing we do to our children. We move them away from the first beliefs we pass on to them: that every one of us, no matter who we are, matters just because we are born, we breathe, and we live. And then we contradict all of that by shifting to this idea that your worth is based on what you do and how well you do it. The winner matters. And the winner really did win.

I do not like meritocracies. Meritocracies assume that we all start on a level playing field and that we are individuals, acting alone, and winning or losing on that level playing field. They assume that winning means something. I don't think that level playing fields exist and I don't think that any of us gets where we are - including success and failure - outside of the context of our communities. For me, this study reads as a diagnosis of broad based compassion deficit; a deficit that we pass down to our children, as surely as we pass on the genes for curly hair. It tells me where we make our mistakes, and where we have the space to change them.

So, what is the next step for Luca? At what point is she supposed to realize, hmmm, if I just sit here with this bowl of cherries in front of me, then maybe I'll get more for myself? Or maybe I'll keep passing the bowl around but instead of just giving them out, I'm going to see this as upping my social capital. And this social capital is going to help me find a better job, a free cabin for the weekend, or just a well dressed group of friends to be seen with on the weekend. So five cherries for you with the family cabin, three cherries for you with the large professional network, and one for you because you are kind and will make me smile when I am sad.

Sounds funny, doesn't it? The thing is, if we are truly honest, the chatter in our heads isn't far off this kind of evaluation. We - and I include myself in that "we" - spend a lot of time assessing ourselves in relation to others - am I getting my fair share or should I speak up and demand a little more? It's how we organize our democracy. Political life in the electoral and policy world is a constantly changing score card of who did what for whom and how much did it cost. Paying back favors can rate higher than "doing the right thing." It's all about whether or not I get mine, not whether or not we have enough to go around for all of us.

We have created this way of being. We pass it on to our children. This is not the way it has to be.

Each of us is born to experience life. How we experience life is up to a whole range of things: genetics, experience, culture, and so on. Increasingly I believe that very little is innate: only our instinct for survival and our evolutionary leaning into reproduction. We experience life so that we can survive it and then pass life on to the next generation. This is true whether or not we have children ourselves, whether we are queer or just plain happy.

But of course that isn't the end of the story. Nowhere in Luca's genes does it say, "at age 13 you will grab your own bowl of cherries and run away, handing out the occasional fruit to those who you deem worthy but otherwise keeping those sweet red orbs for yourself". There is nothing that says that how we share can't be a continually evolving and ever wiser system for relationship and community. There is no reason why "sharing" can't be a measure of our strength, or our compassion and clarity. There is no clear reason not to lift sharing as a value except that the value of individualism is so much louder.

Sharing, communal approaches outside of what some of us do with our biological families? That smacks of socialism and socialism, in our mainstream lexicon, is big, bad and ugly. It makes us lose ourselves into some mindless machine. We lose our individuality. It is childish, an idealistic moment in time before the real world sets in.

I'm thinking that this study needs to go a step further. The question isn't whether or not children outgrow socialism. The question is whether or not we can learn to stay connected to each other enough to keep sharing, even when it gets harder. There are a bunch of things that the U.S. is really good at. One of those things is turning out individually-focused people. Individual rights, private property, private ownership; we know that system inside and out. We are a lot less practiced in sharing, in feeling and trusting a collective process that says that you matter simply because you exist and because you are a part of the whole.

My family, my community, is going to keep encouraging Luca to pass around her bowl of cherries because there are enough to go around. Because the fruit just tastes sweeter when we are all eating it. And because, in the end, the wisest most knowing thing we can do is to practice the hard work of really caring about and for each other. For no other reason than because we all breathe.

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Outstanding article. I know many on this board have rejected Christianity, but a friend of mine has written an outstanding book about the real meaning of Jesus ministry (and all it was about was organizing villages into sharing communities). "The Case of the Missing Person" by R. Earle Rabb.

I love sharing. It always amazes me when other adults act as if they have to be first in every line. I don't think it's social structures asmuch as it is bourgeois morality among the strivers in the middle class.

My religious affiliation is also cultural and our ancient system rewards merit with leadership and duty. I am constantly astounded by the deorai (Gaelic for outsider) approach to seeing some people as worthless or without value. I live in a subculture where everyone has value just because of existence.
In our oldest levels of culture among the ancient Gaels land and homes were owned in common and managed for the common good with each tribe having a place for itself. There were certainly wars and disputes but the war of conquest was a strange thing.
Interesting article.

Great post. Although I would point out that the US clearly doesn't have a meritocracy at all, just a rigid class structure and plenty of greed that usually keeps people with merit down and distributes wealth and power to people based on their parents and, occasionally, talent mixed with greed. A meritocracy would be an improvement.

But... there definitely is enough of the basics to go around. There's no reason we can't learn to share food, housing, health care, etc. with everyone, other than the fact that people become harder to manipulate when they don't have to worry about the basics.